Word for Word/The Cuban Missile Crisis; When the World Stood on Edge And Nobody Died Beautifully

FORTY years ago this week, the United States and the Soviet Union went eyeball to eyeball. Moscow had smuggled nuclear missiles into Cuba. Washington wanted them out. One wrong move and World War III would be at hand.

Newly declassified documents provide a worm's-eye view of those 13 days of crisis. Secret weapons bases, fragile alliances, failed coups, gunpoint weapons inspections, spy flights, the diplomatic dance as the war drums pound -- all are eerily of the moment as Washington goes eyeball to eyeball with Baghdad.

The documents were obtained by the National Security Archive (www.gwu.edu/nsarchiv/), a nonprofit research institute on international affairs, and the Cold War International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, both in Washington, D.C. Excerpts follow. TIM WEINER

Herbert Stanley Marchant, the British ambassador in Havana, writing after the dust had settled, described the scene with aplomb in a cable to his home office:

Any record of the story of these first two weeks of the Cuban crisis must necessarily read more like a wildly improbable sequel to ''Our Man in Havana'' than a Foreign Office dispatch. Indeed I doubt whether a month ago any reputable publisher would have given a moment's consideration to a story in which Soviet Russia was to be credited with shipping some four dozen assorted giant missiles, each one longer than a cricket pitch, across the Atlantic to Cuba, where Russian military technicians disguised as agricultural advisers would set them up in secret. . . .

Whilst we in Cuba were as unprepared for the breaking of the storm as was the rest of the world it would not be true to say it came out of a clear blue sky. [For two years] we have lived in an atmosphere of the wildest rumors, 90 percent of them totally without foundation and many of them specifically about gigantic nuclear missiles. Intelligence agencies must therefore be excused if they tended to discount the hundreds of recent rocket stories from their usual unreliable sources.

The Central Intelligence Agency had long tried to confirm the existence of secret weapons in Cuba. In a post-crisis chronology, it reported:

The Intelligence Community had been flooded with reports of Soviet weapons shipments and missile installations in Cuba. . . . C.I.A.'s files contain 211 intelligence reports on missile and missile-associated activity before 1 January 1962. All of these were either totally false or misinterpretations. . . . C.I.A. analysts had naturally come to view all such reports with a high degree of suspicion. . . . [That] tended to throw a sort of smoke screen around the Soviet offensive deployment when it finally began.

Meanwhile, after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, American spies and soldiers had kept planning to overthrow Fidel Castro. A February 1962 memorandum, circulated at the Pentagon and the C.I.A., described one such scheme that had been approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The first phase of a U.S. endeavor to cause the overthrow of the Castro government should include the creation of a condition of unrest by covert means rather than the active use of major military forces. . . . Then lure or provoke Castro, or an uncontrollable subordinate, into an overt hostile reaction against the United States; a reaction which would in turn create the justification for the U.S. to not only retaliate but destroy Castro with speed, force and determination.

On Oct. 16, 1962, President Kennedy saw photos from a U-2 spy plane showing Soviets setting up nuclear missiles that could hit New York and Washington. For the next 13 days, he weighed whether to bomb, invade or blockade Cuba. The Joint Chiefs recommended air strikes, invasion and occupation. Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara advised the president: ''We need to have two things ready: A government for Cuba, because we're going to need one . . . [and] plans for how to respond to the Soviet Union. . . . It will be an eye for an eye.'' President Kennedy chose to blockade, not invade. And on Oct. 28, the Soviet Union backed down, agreeing to dismantle the missiles in exchange for a secret assurance that the United States would withdraw its own missiles from Turkey. The question of verifying the Soviet withdrawal remained. The Cubans felt betrayed. Their anger surfaced at a late-night meeting in Havana on Nov. 5 with Anastas I. Mikoyan, the Soviet official handling military and economic aid to Cuba. His memo of the conversation:

Cuban President Oswaldo Dorticos: [Cuba] opposes any surveillance of its territory, airspace and ports aimed at inspection of the dismantling and removal of ''offensive'' weapons. . . . [We want] simultaneous inspection on the territory of the U.S.A., Guatemala and other countries of the Caribbean. . . .

Cuban Vice Premier Carlos Rafael Rodriguez: This inspection would refer to areas where camps for the training of counter-revolutionary mercenaries for aggression against Cuba are set up. The inspection could be extended to Florida, not touching, naturally, Cape Canaveral. . . .

Mikoyan: When we complete the evacuation of the missiles, many issues will be seen in a different light. . . . We will be able to adamantly oppose overflights, the quarantine, verification by the Red Cross, violations of airspace. . . . We mustn't underestimate the value of diplomatic means of struggle. . . .

Ernesto (Che) Guevara: An extremely complicated situation has been created in Latin America. Many Communists . . . are dismayed by the actions of the Soviet Union. A number of divisions have broken up. New groups are springing up, factions are springing up. The thing is, we are deeply convinced of the possibility of seizing power in a number of Latin American countries. . . . [But the Soviets' withdrawal means] that we can now expect the decline of the revolutionary movement in Latin America. . . . It may cause difficulties for maintaining the unity of the socialist countries. It seems to me there are already cracks in the unity of the socialist camp.

Mikoyan: That issue worries us too. We are doing a lot to strengthen our unity and, with you, comrades, we will always be with you despite all the difficulties.

Guevara: To the last day?

Mikoyan: Yes, let our enemies die. We must live. . . . We have at our disposal global rockets. Using them would lead to nuclear war. What do you say to this? Shall we die heroically? That is romance. . . . There will come a time when we will show our enemies. But we do not want to die beautifully.

In the end, no one wanted to die beautifully. On Nov. 10, as the missiles were being dismantled, Ambassador Marchant, London's man in Havana, calmly reflected on the passing storm:

My own early disbelief, shared by most of my colleagues, was based on the contention, which I still hold to be true, that Castro's first principle in all his thinking and doing has been to survive and ''defend the Revolution.'' It was consequently our opinion, and we thought it was also Castro's opinion, that the installation of offensive missiles in Cuba was the one thing that would justify United States invasion. . . .

We therefore believed that neither Castro nor Khrushchev would consider such a move. . . . Although we still do not know exactly where our reasoning went astray it seems probable that the fault lay in not realizing how high the stakes were that Khrushchev was prepared to play for. . . .

Life here, in spite of the acute underlying tension, has been relatively undramatic. . . . [The Cuban public] has shown itself remarkably unenthusiastic about dying for the cause.

The same calm has, I am glad to say, prevailed among the British colony. . . . An early interest in the possibility of evacuation has subsided as it became evident that if it was a nuclear war we were heading for, Cuba was perhaps a better place to be than in Britain.

[Among Cuba's people] the relief generally felt, if not publicly expressed, at moving a step or two back from the brink of nuclear war was in itself sufficient to take the sharp edge off any immediate urge to complain, much less to resist or revolt. . . .

The Cuban people, like other peoples all over the world, were no doubt happy at this particular moment in history to settle for any available situation which would avoid a nuclear war.